Larry Brody's Guide to Writing for the Medium Everyone Loves to Hate

LB: “The New Republic” Gets Television All Wrong

…But the post below is still worth reading cuz arguing about this shit is always fun:

by Craig Fehrman

Our best TV shows may be more complex than ever, but our theory of their greatness has become utterly reductive: In this reputedly golden age of television, it all boils down to the showrunner, television’s own auteur.

But this obsession with showrunners—what we might call the showrunner fallacy—has obscured what makes television so great. In his (otherwise excellent) forthcoming book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Brett Martin emerges as the latest exponent of this fallacy. Martin credits the shows in his subtitle, which, together, he labels TV’s “Third Golden Age,” to the showrunners themselves, with their “immense powers of rejection and benediction.” (Martin’s showrunner metaphors tend to be deific). Yet this approach prevents Martin from exploring the people and pressures that are unique to television—exactly what the medium’s reporters and critics should be working to understand. Instead, they praise or blame the showrunner, succumbing to a kind of narrative simplicity that we would never accept in an Emmy-winning drama.

Even before the word showrunner entered our cultural vocabulary, television was a writer’s medium. In its first Golden Age (the experimental 1950s), in its second (the network-drama-powered 1980s), and in all the lesser programming in between, television has depended on its scribes. Bruce Helford, who served as a showrunner on “Roseanne,” once framed that dependence like this: “Television is really bad art. It’s like someone going into a museum and saying, ‘We have a lot of blank walls, let’s make some paintings to fill them up.’” The cheapest (and fastest) way to do this was through writers churning out dialogue-heavy scripts.

The only caveat I’d give to the overall “the showrunner did it” is that we always have to remember that the showrunners are working within the corporate strictures of the medium so that what the audience sees is a result not only of the showrunner’s talent and judgment but also of his or her intellectual (and practical) courage and political infighting ability.

Sorry, Craig, but I think modern day showrunners are Supermen and deserve all the acknowledgement they can get!

About LB

Larry Brody has been profiled in such national magazines and websites as Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Starlog, People, Electronic Media, IndieSlate, TechTV, io9, and of course TV Guide.
A legendary figure in the television writing and production world, with a career going back to the late ’60s, Brody has written and produced literally thousands of hours of network and syndicated television.
Brody has also been active in the TV animation world, writing, creating, consulting, and/or supervising the cult favorite STAR TREK animated TV series, the SILVER SURFER, SPAWN, SUPERMAN, SPIDERMAN, and SPIDER-MAN UNLIMITED animated series, and was showrunner of the French animated series, DIABOLIK, as well as part of the team that developed and wrote the live-action/cgi animation sci-fi series Ace Lightning for the BBC.
Shows written or produced by Brody have won several awards including - yes, it's true - Emmys.